IMPACT OF EXTERNAL GOVERNANCE CONTROL MECHANISMS ON NIGERIAN PUBLIC SECTOR PERFORMANCE: MIXED METHOD APPROACH

Abstract

The importance of public sector entities cannot be under-rated vis-à-vis employment of labour, major participant in the capital market, provision of public goods and services among others. However, achievement of these roles has been hampered due to failure of governance control mechanisms on financial and audit system which had strain the operation of public sector entities in achieving better performance. The main external governance control mechanisms such as Auditor general of the federation and legislatures that are expected to address the situations seem to be dysfunctional in carrying out their duties and responsibilities. These raised question on the effectiveness of external governance control practices on performance of Ministries, Departments and Agencies - MDAs in the Nigerian public sector. The objective of the study is to evaluate the extent to which oversight functions of the Auditor-general of the federation and Public Accounts Committee of National Assembly influence public sector performance in Nigeria. The study employed both questionnaire and interview to gather data concurrently, analyzes the two data sets individually and merged the results during discussion of findings. This approach is known as convergent parallel of mixed method approach. The targeted population for questionnaire admimstration are the Permanent Secretary, Director of Finance, Directors of Personnel and of Planning, Research & Statistics, Accountant and Auditor or equivalents in Ministries, departments and Agencies (MDAs) of the Federal Government of Nigeria, making a total of Six (6) respondents from each of the 175 MDAs as at December, 2018, from which sample size of 280 was selected. The study purposively selected Ten (10) participants comprising of two (2) members of the Public Accounts Committee, Auditor General of the Federation, Accountant General of the Federation, Head of service of the federation, Permanent Secretary Ministry of Finance, Permanent Secretary Ministry of planning, Director of Monitoring and evaluation, Director of staff matter at head of service and Director of Audit of Parastatal for interview. The findings of the study from both quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed that the oversight function of Auditor-General and Public Account committee positively influence the level of performance in public sector. Consequently, the study recommends that the office of the Auditor-General of federation should be further strengthened with required resources to heighten their morale and boost their performance. Also, the PAC should continually encourage and mandate all MDAs to resolve all issues with auditor general to enhance the efficiency of PAC.